Fathers of Folklore

Song collectors—including my dad—honored at the Library of Congress             

"Where have all the folksongs gone, long time passing?
Where have all the folksongs gone, long time ago?
Where have all the folksongs gone?
Gone to collectors, every one!
When will they ever learn ...

Where have the collections gone? ...Gone to archives, every one
Where have all the archives gone? ...Pop stars raid them, every one
Where have all the pop songs gone? ...Gone to records, every one
Where have all the records gone? ...Folks have bought them, every one
Where have all the pop songs gone? ...Folks are singing them, every one!"

     Joe Hickerson, retired head of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, wrote this parody to illustrate the circular interweaving of raw folklore, scholarship, and popular culture. He sang it at the Library on November 16, 2001, during a two-day conference celebrating the legacy and centenary of Benjamin Botkin, who was head of the Folksong Archive in the early 1940s, following Alan Lomax.      Botkin may be best known for his Treasury of American Folklore, published in 1944 and still in print. His preferred term "folklife" united "folklore and the life from which it springs, " and he urged historians and sociologists to honor public folklore: common people's leisure activities and workplace traditions as well as their music, dance, and literature. For more information about this influential visionary, go to www.loc.gov/folklife/botkin.
     The conference closed with a panel discussion of a unique summer camp for children in upstate New York -- Camp Woodland -- whose involvement with local folklife embodied Botkin's ideas and predated the better-known Foxfire program. My father, Norman Cazden, was music director at the camp from 1945 to 1960, and his decades of immersion in Lomax-style musicology brought me to folk music.  
      Norman and his colleague, Herbert Haufrecht, collected hundreds of oral-tradition songs in the Catskill Mountain region. They brought dozens of city-bred campers to meet aging rural singers and help transcribe song lyrics. The collection was nearly ready for publication when Norman died in 1980, and Haufrecht saw the project to completion.
     The fully annotated Folk Songs of the Catskills, which includes a description of the camp by its director, Norman Studer, and a Forward by frequent camp visitor Pete Seeger, was published in 1982 by SUNY Press. A few copies are still available: log onto www.sunypress.org. 
      When Haufrecht died in 1998, his widow decided to honor him with a CD of music from the collection. So, in the spring of 2000, I was thrilled to join Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Jay Unger and Molly Mason, Eric Weissberg, Bob and Louise DeCormier, Hickerson, and Catskills-raised singer/producer Geoff Kaufman in recording songs I had known and loved all my life.
      This CD --Folk Songs of the Catskills: A Celebration of Camp Woodland  -- was released at the Botkin conference, and can be ordered here [link to www.geoffkaufman.com]. I also spoke briefly at the panel about my experiences as a little kid surrounded by such cultural treasures.
Pete and Peggy Seeger joined Hickerson and others in the final sing-along. Their father, musicologist Charles Seeger, had mentored both Botkin and my father, so the personal roots and branches felt profoundly intertwined.
      Naturally, it was bittersweet just being in Washington DC, two months after September 11. ID-checks at the airport were predictably redundant; the city was thick with policemen. Security screeners at the Library politely insisted that an arrogant musician toting several instruments wait his turn with the anonymous public. Yet the marble halls of government gleamed in a pale blue sky with rusty autumn leaves for counterpoint, and Union Station showcased a crafts boutique named for Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring.
     The events of September 11, 2001 have already entered American folklife via oral history, photojournalism, concerts, and essays both in print and online -- multi-faceted responses that justify Botkin's faith in the "freshness and nobility" of ordinary people. The rich variety of folklife projects that now nourish our country's soul are part of Botkin's enduring gift to democracy.